Come Fly Away with Sigma Kay

Pomp juice, glitter and paint covered the hands and clothes of our sisters for weeks in preparation for one of our favorite weekends of the year.

After weeks of hard work and dedication, our pomp boards, skit, dances, banner and more were finally put on display for the community to see. Homecoming is a special tradition at Mizzou — we did invent it, of course — and we are always proud to be a part of such a special weekend.

“Homecoming is a very important tradition for the university and Sigma Kappa because it is a time we can show our alumni our progress and appreciation,” Homecoming Chair Ellen Rasche said.

This year’s homecoming theme was “Truman Goes to Work.” Our house theme was Pilot, so we incorporated that into everything — skit and dance, house decorations, Decorate the District, and float.

A few weeks before homecoming, our fraternity pairing became unable to complete homecoming process with us. They did not choose to step out of homecoming, and we were determined to finish the process individually. The Steering Committee and other houses were very supportive of us — it was a very rare situation.

“One of my proudest moments from this Homecoming was seeing the chapter come together and step up when our pairing stepped down from Homecoming,” Ellen said.

Our sisterhood really shined through as we took this opportunity to show campus what we are capable of. It was incredible to see the friendships that blossomed out of this process. We are so proud of our sisterhood and everything that we accomplished!

Earlier in the semester, we participated in three homecoming service events. Women volunteered at the Food Bank, collected donations downtown, and set up in front of Gerbes to collect food and monetary donations. All of the money raised benefited the Food Bank for Central and Northeast Missouri. The greek community collected more than 24,000 pounds of canned food!

We also participated in the MU Blood Drive, which collected 5,114 units of blood — that’s over 15,000 lives saved! Women helped by donating blood and volunteering at the event. We love giving back!

“It is so great knowing that while we are having fun with events like skit and house decorations, we are also helping the community and the university,” Ellen said.

Another part of Homecoming is sharing our creativity with the community. Many girls worked on this gorgeous banner that we proudly hung on the house all week.

We also decorated the windows at The Fieldhouse as part of Decorate the District. Every grouping is assigned a business downtown and they decorate it to celebrate homecoming. We incorporated our pilot theme into the window design.

We joined the stage Wednesday night to perform our skit and dance to the Greek community. Sisters portrayed movie stars who were in a plane crash. A producer purposely crashed the plane so he could make a good movie. His plan took a unpredictable turn when the plane landed in a swamp in Florida, where they encountered swamp people. Because the skit was originally written for men and women, sisters stepped in to play all of the parts. Some even dressed up in wigs and crazy outfits!

Our dance team absolutely killed it as well! They spent countless hours relearning the dances without their male counterparts. They even did the exact same flips and tricks that they were originally doing with the men.

On Friday night, Greek Town was transformed with house decorations, food trucks and huge crowds. We pomped, painted, glittered and built the decorations for weeks before finally displaying them for the community. Kids and adults came from all over Columbia to see the displays and watch a short skit at each house. Our skit featured Truman the Tiger and Albert, who is the University of Florida’s mascot.

We woke up bright and early Saturday morning to walk in the parade, which went through campus and downtown. We walked and cheered behind our float. It was so fun to share our hard work with the community and cheer for our sisters.

We are so proud of all the hard work our sisters put in to make this homecoming so special. It was a long process, but there was no one better to spend it with than each other!

“Seeing everyone step up and everything come together in the end really made me proud of my chapter,” Ellen said. “I cannot wait to return as an alumnae next year and in the years to come to see the amazing things Sigma Kappa will do in Homecoming.”

Each event in homecoming is judged and awarded a certain amount of points. The results are then turned into placements — both in individual categories and overall.